


Every Rose Its Thorn - A Coats & Customs Side Story

by imaginary_golux



Series: Coats and Customs 'verse [6]
Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Infertility
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-15
Updated: 2014-01-15
Packaged: 2018-01-08 20:34:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1137087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imaginary_golux/pseuds/imaginary_golux
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose Took is a cheerful child, a perfectly normal fauntling, who grows up into the kind of woman who could marry Nori son of Korin, Spymaster of Belegost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Every Rose Its Thorn - A Coats & Customs Side Story

Rose Took is a cheerful child, as hobbit children tend to be: helpful, friendly, prone to laughter and small mischief. Her parents dote on her, and her older siblings let her tag along on their simple adventures, and she sits patiently with her younger siblings when they need to be entertained.

When she is fifteen, just beginning to bloom into full womanhood, she falls ill. It is a strange illness, lingering and cruel, and she spends many days lying curled around herself in bed, whimpering from the pain of it; and for many days the healers and midwives cannot figure out what it is, or how to cure it. At last one of the oldest and wisest of the healers in the Shire comes to see her, two months after she has first fallen ill, and looks her over with grave eyes.

“I have seen this before,” she says at last, and shakes her head. “I can stop the progress of the disease, but, child…you will never be fertile.”

Rose cries for many days, as the cure works its way through her system and her stomach cramps and cramps again. How shall she become a woman of the Shire now? No man will marry a barren woman, no children will run through the halls of her smial, no grandchildren will visit her in her old age. There is no bleaker future for a child of the Shire.

When she is well again, as well as she will ever be, she tells her parents to call her Thorn. She is not a rose anymore, not a fertile bloom with promise of seeds for the future. She is a thorn, sharp and infertile and cruel, and she will be called as such.

She grows into a strange woman, does Thorn Took, bitter and sharp-tongued, clever and sure-footed and prone to solitude, for she can never really speak to anyone without the fact of her barrenness hanging over them like a cloud which will never be dispersed. She is a hobbit of the Shire, but she will never be one of her people.

*

The dwarves come to the Blue Mountains when she is forty, when she is a grown woman living in her parents’ smial and watching her sisters and brothers marry and produce child after child after child. The dwarves are something new and exciting, and she joins the other lasses who take the wagons to the new city. Most of the dwarves are, she decides, much like hobbit men; they laugh and talk with the women, eyeing broad hips with thoughts of children, and their eyes skid over Thorn’s relatively slender figure, and they are startled by her sharp tongue.

But there is one dwarf who laughs when she sharpens her tongue on him, and comes back again and again to tease her into conversation. He has a truly improbable hairstyle, and is something of a frustration to his sober older brother and his bookish younger brother. The other dwarves warn Thorn that he is a thief and a never-do-well, and she should be wary of him; but Thorn likes his laughter and his cheerful, amoral outlook on the world, and the way he takes her bitterness in stride and never mocks her for it.

When he proposes to her, she shakes her head. “I’ll never be able to bear you children,” she tells him. “Is that not why your people are marrying mine, for the fertility of the hobbits?”

But Nori shakes his head and keeps his hand extended with the ring upon it. “I could never afford children,” he says. “A truth for a truth: I am King Thorin’s spymaster, and a child of my blood would be a hostage to fate. I could not marry a fertile hobbit lass, and know every day that the children she bore me might someday die by violence and cruelty for no sin of their own. But I could marry a woman with a mind as sharp as mine, who knows the world is cruel.”

Thorn looks at him for a long moment, standing with his hand out and every strand of his remarkable hairstyle perfectly in place, and knows with sudden clarity that she loves him dearly.

“Then let us be married,” she says, and takes the ring from his hand and puts it on her own finger, and Nori flings his arms up and whoops with joy.

*

She’s good at codebreaking, somewhat to her own surprise, and at the endless paperwork which being a spymaster requires, while Nori is far better at the footwork, the infiltrations and rumor-spreading and quiet words in certain ears. So it suits both of them for her to stay in their little office, up near the Royal Apartments, and sort through paperwork and make careful, coded notes, and for Nori to roam through Belegost and talk to everyone and bring his news back to her each evening.

Thorn Took will never have a child, but she watches over all of Belegost, and that is very nearly as good.


End file.
